CHAPTER ELEVEN
BENNET
"Come in, Bennet. I'm not going to bite."
Jenn is leaning against her doorframe with her key already in the lock and a look on her face that is patient and a little amused. It’s doing absolutely nothing to help me figure out what my feet are supposed to do next.
Her gaze has dropped to my mouth a few times since we got in the elevator, and she's done that thing with her lips — a small, unconscious dart of her tongue — often enough that I've stopped pretending not to notice it.
This is the natural progression of things. I understand that academically. A decent date, easy conversation, the pier, the kiss for the photographer, an elevator ride up that had its own specific charge to it. This is what comes next. I know that.
And yet here I am, standing in the hallway like a man who has just discovered that knowing what comes next and being able to make his body cooperate with that knowledge are two entirely different problems.
The thing is, I'm not sure if I've always been this gawky about it or if I'm only now becoming fully sentient.
For the better part of the last ten years, I've existed in a clear-cut kind of comfortable solitude — not lonely, I told myself, just selective — and the bad boy persona made that easy.
Nobody tries to set up the billionaire playboy.
Nobody suggests he needs fixing when he looks like he's having the time of his life in every photograph.
The image I built was supposed to be a temporary solution, something to get people off my back for six months while I figured out what I actually wanted, and then six months became a year and a year became several and somewhere in there, the temporary solution became the entire structure of my social life.
It worked. It worked very well. And the cost of it, standing here right now outside Jenn's apartment, is that I have essentially no practice in any arena that matters.
The kissing I can do. Apparently. She didn't seem to have complaints on the pier, and the photograph looked convincing enough.
But whatever comes after the kissing, the actual architecture of letting someone in, I have spent a decade very carefully not building those muscles, and it turns out muscles you don't use atrophy in ways that are difficult to explain.
Jenn is still watching me with that patient, slightly amused expression.
"I should go," I say.
She tilts her head in the way she does. "Okay."
"It's not — " I stop. Start again. "Tonight was good. It was sincerely good, Jenn."
"I know." She straightens off the doorframe. "You don't have to explain yourself, Bennet. We said friends." She shrugs, easy as anything. "Friends don't owe each other explanations at the door."
I look at her and feel something that is mostly gratitude and a little bit of shame and entirely too complicated to sort out in a hallway at eleven PM.
"The pediatric nursing thing," I say. "Do you like it?"
She blinks at the subject change, then smiles. "I love it. Why?"
"Just — " I shake my head. "Goodnight, Jenn."
"Goodnight, Bennet." She unlocks her door and pauses, looking back at me over her shoulder. "For what it's worth, I had a good time too. Weird. But good."
She goes inside.
I stand in the hallway for a moment longer than necessary, looking at her closed door, thinking about the ease of her — the way she asks what she wants to know and accepts what she gets and doesn't make any of it heavier than it needs to be.
I think about what it costs to be that open with another person.
Then I knock on her door.
She answers with a smirk, like she'd been standing on the other side of it waiting to see how long I'd last.
"Friends kiss and stuff," I say, with my hands in my pockets.
"And stuff," she repeats.
"Your tongue felt nice. A little big, maybe. But I didn't mind."
She stares at me.
I stare at her, pull on the back of my neck, and nervously press my lips together.
"Oh, for fuck’s sake, Bennet. Come inside before I change my mind." She turns and walks into the apartment with a heavy breath. "Who taught you this shit?"
"Nobody," I say, following her in. "That's kind of the whole problem."
She chuckles and gives me a slow once-over. "Okay." She nods, mostly to herself, then heads to the kitchen. Gerald the cat materializes from wherever cats go when they're judging you, takes one look at me, and exits the room with profound disdain.
"He likes almost nobody," Jenn says, pulling two glasses from the cabinet.
"I have that effect."
"On cats?"
"On most things."
She pours two glasses of wine and hands me one before she leans against the counter, taking a sip. "So. Friends kiss and stuff."
"And stuff," I confirm.
"We're setting the bar on the floor; you know that, right?"
"The bar has been on the floor for a while," I say. "I'm just finally admitting it."
She smiles over the rim of her glass. "Touché."
"Friends admit things to each other in confidence and without judgment." I say it matter-of-fact, like I'm proposing terms to a contract, which I suppose I am.
"Should I be sitting down for this?"
"Maybe I should be."
"Make yourself at home." She waves a manicured hand toward the living room.
I take a seat on the couch while she takes the seat on the chair across from me, legs folded underneath her. I gulp down another half a glass of wine and shake my head, mostly at myself.
Maybe it's because I don't have romantic feelings for Jenn that I'm about to say something I've never said out loud to another living person.
There are no stakes, or any risk of her looking at me differently in a way that matters.
She already thinks I'm unhinged, and she's still here, so the bar for what constitutes too much information has effectively been removed.
I look into her eyes for a long time before taking a deep breath.
"When I was eighteen, I had a pretty traumatic experience.
A girl I liked — really liked, the kind of thing you only feel when you're young enough to not know better — used me for a prank.
She and her boyfriend set me up in front of an audience.
The whole thing was designed to humiliate me, and it worked exactly the way they designed it to. "
“Wow. Bennet. How fucked.”
I hate reliving this. I hate the way my body still knows how to feel it, ten years later, like the information never fully left the tissue.
I drop my head back against the couch and look up at the ceiling.
"You need to paint," I say.
"Focus, Bennet."
"The ceiling is — it's...there’s a yellow undertone. You want something cooler there; it'll open the room up."
"Bennet."
I exhale and close my eyes.
"I never really recovered from it the way I should have; I handled it by becoming someone else entirely.
New city, new name, new everything. And the someone else I built didn't date, didn't get close to people, didn't.” I pause and take another deep breath, and exhale.
“I didn't do much of anything except work and perform for the press because performing felt safer than the real version. "
I press my palms into my eyes. "The girl in the prank, she's back in my life."
"Does she know who you are?"
"No."
"And the not recovering," she says carefully. "How not recovered are we talking?"
This is the part I've never said out loud. Not to anyone except Rosalie, and even with Rosalie it came out sideways, incomplete, hedged into a half-truth easier to hold.
"I'm a virgin." I keep my head back and my eyes focus on the ceiling again. I can’t bring myself to meet her gaze.
“You’re very quiet.” I say, and it comes out a bit more somber than I’d like.
"I know." She blows out a breath. "I just needed a second."
"Take your time."
I sit up and finish the rest of my wine in one go.
When I look up, her eyes are hooded and her bottom lip has slipped between her teeth, her gaze raking slowly up my body.
"Gotta admit, Sullivan." She wiggles her eyebrows. "I'm having some pretty inappropriate thoughts about our friendship right now." Then she beams that smile at me.
My head falls back with a laugh.
Fuck. I needed that.
"We're going to finish these drinks," she says, standing to refill my glass. "And then I'm going to show you that not everyone is her." She crosses to the couch and sits beside me, pulling her legs up underneath her again. "And you're going to let me. Because that's what friends do."
I look at her.
"Without the running commentary," she adds. "On tongues or otherwise."
"I make no promises."
"Bennet."
"Fine." I put my hands up in surrender. "No commentary."
"Chug," she says. "Then talk. Then we'll figure out the rest."
We throw our wine back like shots.
Then she slides over to me and straddles my lap.
The barely there dress she wore to dinner rides up just enough and my brain short circuits completely. Like a fuse blowing — just gone. Whatever intelligent thought was forming evaporates before it can finish.
"How many women have you been with," she asks, settling her weight on top of me. "Not sex, of course. Other stuff."
I put my hands on her thighs because they're right there and it seems like the correct response to the situation, then immediately question that decision and remove them.
"Define other stuff," I say.
She takes my hands and puts them back on her bare thighs. "Kissing. Touching. Anything with another person that wasn't a handshake."
I wince before I can school my expression, that night rushing to the front of my mind uninvited. "One."
She waits.
"The girl from the prank," I say. "That was — that was the last time anyone was this close." I pause. "Or on my lap."
I brace for the pity, or the careful handling that makes you feel like a problem being managed; but it doesn't come. Instead she reaches up and slowly unbuttons my shirt
"Okay," she says. "So, we start there."
"Start where?"
"Here." She runs a hand along my chest. "Just this. Nothing you don't want."
My hands are still on her thighs. I'm aware of approximately eleven things simultaneously and able to process maybe three of them. "I should tell you, I talk when I'm nervous."
"I've noticed."
"It might get worse."
"Bennet." She tilts her head. "Shut up and let me help you."
She says it so plainly, so without agenda, that whatever wound knot that’s been in my chest for ten years loosens by one degree.
Just one. But it's something.
"Okay," I say.
She leans in slowly, giving me every opportunity to change my mind, and when her mouth meets mine it's different from the pier — no camera, no performance, no reason for it except that we're here and she's offering something I haven't let myself have since I was eighteen years old.
My hands tighten on her thighs.
She doesn't laugh.
I sigh into the kiss and let her lead it, bringing my hands to the hem of her dress and sliding them underneath, palms flat against the heat of her back.
She scoots closer and deepens it, her tongue finding mine, and whatever flatness I felt at the pier is gone.
This is different, this is a thunderstorm building from nothing, heat moving through me in waves that keep cresting higher and I'm desperate for the next flicker of her tongue against mine in a way that feels almost unbearable.
I'm so fucking hard. She has to feel it because the next thing I know her hips start to move in slow tortuous grinds, and she moans into my mouth when I drag my nails gently down her spine.
"Fuck, that's a good move," she breathes against my lips. "Again."
I oblige.
When she moans the second time, it’s like the sound hits the wrong switch.
Her hips. The heat. The building intensity of it pressing in from all sides.
The laughter.
The lights.
The wet fabric against my skin and a room full of faces.
I try to shake it off. I try to stay here, in this apartment, with Jenn, who is warm and real and not Blaire. But the grinding doesn't stop and the heat keeps building and the past and the present are collapsing into each other in a way I can't separate fast enough and suddenly I can't...
I grab her by the waist and lift her off my lap and I'm on my feet before either of us understands what's happening.
We're both breathing hard. Hers is arousal. Mine is something else entirely, and it’s climbing up the back of my throat causing my chest to lock around a breath I can't seem to finish taking.
"Bennet." Jenn's voice, careful. "What's wrong?"
I can't look at her. My hands have come up in front of me like I'm trying to locate the edges of the room and I'm two seconds from something I haven't felt in years, the specific vertigo of a panic attack arriving whether you want it to or not.
"I don't — I have to—" The words won't form. "I need a—"
"Fuck." She's on her feet immediately rushing over to me, and then her hands are on my face, both palms cupping my jaw. Her thumbs move across my cheeks and come away wet. I hadn't even realized, I hadn't felt them, but apparently I've been crying.
"Hey." Her voice drops. "I'm sorry. I pushed before you were ready. That's on me." Her thumbs make another slow pass. "Come sit. Just breathe for me. Right here."
She steers me back to the couch and I go because my legs are cooperating marginally better than the rest of me. She sits beside me, close but not on me, and puts one hand flat on my back between my shoulder blades and doesn't move it.
"In," she says. "Slow."
I breathe in.
"Out."
I breathe out.
Gerald appears from wherever he's been hiding and jumps onto the cushion on my other side, circles once, and sits down against my thigh.
"He likes you," Jenn whispers.
"You said—" Inhale. "He hates—" Exhale. "Everyone."
"He does." Her hand moves in a slow circle. "Shush and breathe."
The panic recedes the way it always does — slowly, leaving behind it a specific exhaustion and shame I know isn't rational but can't seem to stop feeling anyway.
I drop my head into my hands. "I'm sorry, Jenn."
"Don't." Her hand keeps moving. "You don't apologize for that. Not to me."
“Thank you.”
"The girl from the prank," she says once my breathing has fully settled.
"Yeah. Blaire Alexander."
She nods and lays her head on my shoulder without pushing any further, and we sit there like that while the room settles around us.
After a few beats she says quietly, "Fuck Blaire Alexander."
And that's how I know this woman and I will be best friends for life.